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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Modi’s Grand Insurance Scheme Prioritises Profit Over Farm Losses -Srishti Jaswal

-Article-14.com

Over 3 years to 2020, as India’s farm crisis deepened, 18 insurance companies running Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s crop-insurance scheme rejected nearly a million claims. As pandemic and pestilence devastated farms, we reveal how the scheme’s complex fine print frustrates farmers and disregards individual loss

Hisar, Haryana: As 2020 began, Haryana cotton farmer Ramandeep sensed it would be harsher than the previous years: the winter rains were scanty, withering his crop of mustard and wheat.

In February that year, Ramandeep—a short, sturdy and self assured 34-year-old—allowed the automatic renewal of his farm-insurance policy under the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY), the Prime Minister’s Crop Insurance Scheme.

In 2017, when Ramandeep took a Rs 180,000 loan from a rural bank, he had no option but to sign up for the PMFBY—a five-year-old programme supposed to provide a safety net for those of India’s 290 million farmers who lost their crop to pest, flood and famine. If he wanted the loan, the government required him to sign up for the PMFBY.

As 2020 began, the government removed that requirement, but not only did Ramandeep think it was a good idea to keep the PMFBY insurance policy running, he  persuaded others farmers in his home village of Kirtan in the western Haryana district of Hisar to follow suit.

“I sensed that this year (2020) might be extremely hard,” Ramandeep, told Article 14. Ramandeep’s advice appeared prescient.

On 24 March 2020, Modi imposed a national lockdown at a four-hour notice to stem the spread of Covid-19. Supply chains were disrupted, and, as the months rolled on, Ramandeep (who uses only one name) could not get seeds and fertiliser for the monsoon planting.

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